When Skype announced its real-time translation program back in May, most of us seized on the sci-fi-ness off it all—Star Trek's universal translator, Babel fish, etc. But the technology is very real, and has been for years, just it separate pieces. Skype Translator is is the commercial culmination of those efforts,…

Using names like Siri, Cortana, and Google Now, advanced algorithms and technologies that would have baffled engineers and scientists half a century ago now rest in the palm of our hands. Talking with technology is the future of computing—mainly because that's the way we're built to communicate.

Today Nuance is releasing version 13 of its Dragon NaturallySpeaking voice-dictation software. More than just an automated memo-writer, Nuance hopes to make the software into a voice-control-everything feature for PC users. And it comes damn close to pulling it off.

In the two decades following World War II, it seemed there was no limit to technological growth. Sure, a computer was still the size of an entire room, and no one had telephones in their pockets. But techno-utopian ideas like flying cars and jetpacks and meal pills were all being taken very seriously as the inevitable…

In a blog post today, AT&T SVP for technology and network operations John Donovan made the official announcement that the API for Watson (the company's proprietary voice-recognition software that transcribes spoken words into text) are now open to and available for app developers to access.

This clip from an early 1990's AT&T concept video shows a futuristic world of voice recognition, networked computing and nearly sentient robotic sous chefs. And yet our protagonist's computer doesn't even know the word "HURRY." But what our machines lack in vocabulary they more than make up for in obnoxious pop up…

Microsoft's motion gaming peripheral is, if executed correctly, quite possibly the future of gaming. It might even be the future of Windows 8 and computers everywhere. But how much fun is playing with Kinect right now?

We've all seen futuristic movies with awesome Hal and Jarvis computers that are smart enough to recognize what we want them to do. They're like people. Today's computers are learning to be like that and they're already replacing us.

In this video, the BBC takes us inside the top secret headquarters of IA Technology, where the former ejector seat company is working on the "world's first fully accurate voice recognition phone," the Zumba.

The Navigation aid for the Blind headset is a GPS device, which not only works through speech recognition, but also uses obstacle detection technology that alerts the blind of any sleeping bums or other obstructions he could trip over as he is being guided to his destination. In 2003, we reported on a GPS navigation…

AT&T's Speech Mashups is a web-based service that will bring voice-activated search to the iPhone, as well as other Edge and 3G handsets. Instead of managing speech recognition on the actual handset, Speech Mashups sends the audio sample to the server, processes it and sends back a text transcription or command to…

There are plenty of iPod cradles that let you remote control the device, some built-in to cars, but Direct Voxx has come up with the Muso that lets you do it by voice. It's an interesting bit of kit that doesn't require training to understand you, and lets you demand particular tracks, scan through playlists, pause…

It sounds like a double-whammy of a bad idea: a free phone service that determines which ads to target to you by applying speech-recognition to all your conversations. To make things worse, the home page of ThePudding.com insults potential customers by saying it's "a breakthrough technology that makes your phone calls…

Click to viewWe've heard of VoiceSignal speech recognition for lots of other phones, but now VoiceSignal sent us a video that allegedly shows it working for the first time on the iPhone. According to the guy in the clip, a couple of VoiceSignal engineers designed this app, but all we see it doing so far is…

VoIP telephone service provider Vonage just began offering Visual Voice Mail, a text transcription service that turns all of your voicemail messages into text that's immediately emailed to you. Using a combination of speech-to-text software and human transcribers, Vonage is charging 25 cents per transcription, which…

We mentioned a Star Trek-like Phraselater translation device a few years ago here on the Giz, but now it's new and improved. The Phraselator P2 from VoxTec is a bulky-looking hand-held contraption that functions like the Tower of Babel in your hands.